American Journal of Applied Sciences 3 (5): 1831-1835, 2006

ISSN 1546-9239
2005 Science Publications

Designing Omni-Directional Mobile Robot with Mecanum Wheel

1
Jefri Efendi Mohd Salih, 1Mohamed Rizon, 1Sazali Yaacob,
1
Abdul Hamid Adom and 2Mohd Rozailan Mamat
1
School of Mechatronics Engineering, Kolej Universiti Kejuruteraan Utara Malaysia
01000 Kangar, Perlis, Malaysia
2
Terengganu Advanced Technical Institute, Jalan Panchor, Teluk Kalong
24000 Kemaman, Terengganu, Malaysia

Abstract: This study presents the processes undertaken in the design and development of an intelligent
omni-directional mobile robot using four custom-made mecanum wheels. The mecanum wheel
developed consists of nine rollers made from delrin. All mecanum wheels are independently powered
using four units of precisian gear DC motors and the wheel/motor assemblies were mounted directly to
the robot chassis made using an aluminum frame. A four channel high power H-bridge using 2 units of
LMD 18200 motor drivers IC circuit was design, built and interfaced to a BasicStamp (BS2)
microcontroller board. Basic mobility algorithm using BasicStamp software was developed to test the
basic mobility capabilities and test the qualitative view of the systems mobility performance. An
experiment was set-up to analyze the motion characteristic of the mobile robot motion in Y-axis, X-
axis and rotary motion. Data from the experiment will be used for mathematically model for mobile
robot platform and speed controller modeling and design. Mecanum wheel mobile robot provides a
convenient platform for further development in the mobile platform. The combination of mechanical
design on the wheel and chassis, motion control and multiple input/output sensors allow the
exploration of large number of control algorithm and software to be implemented to the robot for
practical applications.

Key words: Mecanum wheel, mobile robot, microcontroller, motion control

INTRODUCTION

This project utilized the Mecanum wheel design

pioneered in 1973 by Mecanum ABs Bengt Ilon.
Mecanum wheel is based on the principle of a central
wheel with a number of rollers placed at an angle
around the periphery of the wheel. The angled
peripheral roller translates a portion of the force in the
rotational direction of the wheel to force normal to the
wheel directional. Depending on each individual wheel
direction and speed, the resulting combination of all
Fig. 1: Mecanum wheel based on Ilons concept,
these forces produces a total force vector in any desired
Source from[1]
direction thus allowing the platform to move freely in
direction of resulting force vector, without changing the
direction of the wheel. Figure 1 shows a traditional only being driven in the y-direction. Positioning four
Mecanum wheel design by Ilon with the peripheral mecanum wheels, one at each corner of the chassis (two
roller with 45 degree slope held in place from the mirrored pairs), allows net forces to be formed in the x,
outside. y and rotational direction (Fig. 2).
Using four of mecanum wheels provides omni- A difficulty with this strategy is that there are four
directional movement for a vehicle without needing a variables to control three degrees-of-freedom. In this
conventional steering system Slipping is a common case the system is said to be over determined and it is
problem in the mecanum wheel as it has only one roller possible to create conflicts in the actuation. As a result
with a single point of ground contact at any one time. of the constraints associated with the mecanum wheel
Due to the dynamics of the mecanum wheel, it can some form of controller is required to produce
create force vectors in both the x and y-direction while satisfactory motion.

Corresponding Author: Mohamed Rizon, School of Mechatronics Engineering, Kolej Universiti Kejuruteraan Utara Malaysia,
01000 Kangar, Perlis, Malaysia. Tel: 60-4-9798333, Fax: 60-4-9798334
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 Am. J. Applied Sci., 3 (5): 1831-1835, 2006

Fig. 3: Design structure of the mecanum wheel

Fig. 2: Force vectors created by Mecanum wheel

MATERIALS AND METHODS

As this was a complete Mechatronic project

incorporating mechanical, electronic and software
development, the different areas were developed
synergistically thus allowing interactions between the
disciplines to be viewed and managed. It also meant
that all three core disciplines needed to be developed to
a certain stage before any one area could be further
worked on. Although it was physically possible to use
other means to develop the core areas independently, a
synergistic approach tends to be more efficient. Even Fig. 4: Design structure of mecanum wheel mobile
though this parallel design approach was used, the areas robot
of development shall be discussed in sections assuming
that other sections have already been completed to a
certain level and are referenced where necessary.

Developments and implementation: The development

for this project can be divided into the major process,
the mechanical design for mecanum wheel and mobile
robot chassis, electronics design for 4 channel motor
driver and interfacing with BasicStamp microcontroller
board and software development for motion control.

Mechanical design: The mecanum wheel been develop
consist of nine roller with diameter of 110 mm. Each
roller diameter is 20 mm at the center and 16 mm at
each end. All rollers are made by engineering plastic
call delrin. The roller was hold by roller holder made by
stainless steel and the center hub was made aluminum.
Design structure of the mecanum wheel shown in Fig.
3. All mecanum wheels are independently powered
using four units of precisian gear DC motor and the
wheel/motor assemblies were mounted directly to the
robot chassis.
Typical mecanum wheel mobile robot platforms
are square or rectangular, attach with wheel with +45
roller and wheel with -45 roller on each side. The
omni-directional capabilities of the platform depend on
each wheel contact firmly with the surface and some of
the mecanum wheel mobile robots are equipped with
suspension system. For simplicity our mecanum wheel
and motor assembly are mounted directly on the
platform chassis made from aluminum frame and metal
plate.
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Fig. 5: Single motor driver circuit
The size of mobile robot approximately 20 cm
(width) and 30 cm (length). Figure 4 show the design
structure of the mobile robot.
Electronic design: Four channel bi-directional motor
driver been design to drive all four mecanum wheels.
The specifications developed for the necessary driver
board were:
* The circuit should be compatible with a single
logic-level PWM input signal for speed control of
each wheel and a single logic-level input
line for the direction of motor rotation for each
wheel.
* The circuit should be able to operate with a high
PWM carrier frequency from the microcontroller
(20 MHz) to provide inaudible operation.
* The circuit would require four independent H-
Bridge drivers for bi-directional motion.
 Am. J. Applied Sci., 3 (5): 1831-1835, 2006

* Each H-Bridge driver circuit must be capable of

providing suitable continuous current at 12V DC.
The prototype motor driver was develop using 2
units of LMD18200 IC manufactured by National
Semiconductor that capable of 3 amps continuous
current at up to 55V DC and also had extra integrated
features including current sensing and thermal overload
shutdown[2]. Figure 5 show the single motor driver
circuit.
The DC motors used in this platform have built-in
40:1 gear reduction and speed at 65 RPM at 12VDC.
The optical encoders provided velocity information on
each wheel to the micro-controller. A four channel high
power H-bridge driver board was interfaced to a Fig. 6: System hardware architecture
BasicStamp (BS2) micro-controller board. The overall
system hardware architecture (Fig. 6) shows the
connections between hardware components of the
mobile robot platforms.

Microcontroller: In order to give the existing robot

any intelligent functionality some form of on-board
processor was essential. Microcontrollers are ideally
suited for such an application as they are compact, have
many built-in hardware features such as timers and
UARTS, have a significant number of digital I/O lines
and have low power requirements. The essential
microcontroller specification for this project was its
ability to generate four independent PWM signals.
Other general requirements were; high speed operation
to ensure environmental data could be processed at real-
time. BASIC Stamp micro-controllers have been
chosen this project for well-known for their ease of use,
comfortable programming language and easy
debugging using a PC. Figure 7 show the BasicStamp
(BS2) microcontroller board.
Table 1 and 2 show the relationship between output
data of the micro-controller for speed (PWM) and bi-
directional (DIR) control for all four DC motors and the
omni-directional motion of the mecanum wheel mobile
robot.
Experiment setup: With the use of the prototype motor
driver board and test software to programming the
microcontroller output as list in Table 2 and 3, the basic
mobility control was gained via programming the basic
motion software to the microcontroller. This setup
allowed the following motions as well as the increase
and decrease of speed.
* Forward all four wheels forward in
* Backward all four wheels move backward at the
same speed
* Right slide wheel 1 and 4 forward, wheel 2 and 3
backward
* Left slide wheel 2 and 3 forward, wheel 1 and 4
backward.
* Clockwise - wheel 1 and 3 forward, wheel 2 and 3
backward
Fig. 7: BasicStamp microcontroller board
* Counter-Clockwise wheel 1 and 3 backward,
wheel 2 and 3 forward
The following list in Table 2, show the basic
motion of mecanum wheel mobile robot with their
corresponding wheel direction. By varying the
individual motor/wheel speed we can achieve driving
direction along any vector in X-Y axis. The actuation
required for these movements can be seen in Fig. 8.
RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
The testing gave a qualitative view of the systems
mobility performance. The forward and reverse motion
as acceptable but did not utilize any function of the
mecanum wheels. Likewise with rotational motion, the
system performed as would be expected of a standard
differential drive platform. The translational motion in
X- axis, however, was not acceptable as the platform
would tend to wander in the y-direction when
attempting to traverse sideways. Investigation showed
that the motor systems were working adequately but the
mecanum wheels themselves and mobile robot chasis
needed some minor modification.
A qualitative view of the platforms basic mobility
for translational movement showed an increase in
performance but at this stage some form of quantitative

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 Am. J. Applied Sci., 3 (5): 1831-1835, 2006

Fig. 8: Required actuation for general movement, Source from[3]

Table 1: Switch control on microcontroller output

Output Pin Data
0 PWM input for M1 (High = 100% PWM)
1 Direction input for M1 (High= Clockwise , Low=Counter Clock-Wise)
2 PWM input for M2 (High = 100% PWM)
3 Direction input for M2 (High= Clockwise , Low=Counter Clock-Wise)
4 PWM input for M3 (High = 100% PWM)
5 Direction input for M3 (High= Clockwise , Low=Counter Clock-Wise)
6 PWM input for M4 (High = 100% PWM)
7 Direction input for M4 (High= Clockwise , Low=Counter Clock-Wise)

Table 2: Motor control for basic motion

M1 M2 M3 M4
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
PWM_1 DIR_1 PWM_2 DIR_2 PWM_3 DIR_3 PWM_4 DIR_4 Basic Motion
High High High High High High High High forward
High Low High Low High Low High Low backward
High Low High High High High High Low right slide
High High High Low High Low High High left slide
High High High Low High High High Low Turning clockwise
High Low High High High Low High High Turning counter-clockwise

analysis was required to review further minor
modifications to the system especially on the mecanum
wheel design and close-loop speed control on each
motor. Data from the experiment will be used for
mathematically model for mobile robot platform and
speed controller modelling and design.
The accuracy of direction and movement of the
mobile robot depend much on slip rate of the wheel on
floor various conditions. As are result, the real position
and orientation of the mobile robot deviate from the
original planned course or path. The other parameters
that influence the accuracy of movement of mecanum
wheel mobile robot are surface contact and traction.
Because of slippage problem, motion analysis for
mecanum wheel type vehicle is complicate. Visual dead
reckoning for motion control and odometry are the
method to reduce the motion error.
Close loop control using model base method or
classical cascade PID for speed controller of mobile
robot must be integrated into control algorithm to
maintain set-point speeds in both the x and y-directions.
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The combination of these two speeds gives the actual
speed and more importantly direction of the robot.
Future work: Mecanum wheel mobile robot provided
a convenient platform for continued development. The
combination of mechanical design on the wheel and
chassis, motion control and multiple input/output
sensors allow the exploration of large number of control
algorithm and software to be implemented to the robot
for practical application.
We are currently developing a tele-operated
mecanum wheel mobile robot using RF module for data
communication between robot and host computer. The
mobile robot will implement closed-loop wheel speed
control using fuzzy logic algorithm for robot omni-
directional kinematics and motion control.
The mecanum wheel also will be used as our
platform for Autonomous Guided Vehicle (AGV) in
Flexible Manufacturing System (FMS) at Robotic and
Automation laboratory in KUKUM. The used of
mecanum wheel AGV with the lifting mechanism on
 Am. J. Applied Sci., 3 (5): 1831-1835, 2006
the AGV platform will be part of FMS system and
optional with the current AGV that used differential
drive and gantry robot at the ASRS station
CONCLUSION
This paper presents an overview over the primary
design stage of omni-directional mobile robot using
mecanum wheel. The strength of this wheel is the
enhanced maneuverability of the mobile robot that
needs extreme maneuverability in congested
environment. Mecanum wheel mobile robot research
addresses many problems in robotics such as sensor
integration, real-world modelling, actuator and sensor
control, path planning and navigation, task-level
planning and execution and the control of the robotic
system as a whole. Moreover, building mecanum
wheels mobile robot provides a stringent test bed for
new concepts and approaches in both mechanical
design for mecanum wheel and overall mobile robot
chassis and also the design for electronic hardware and
software.
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This design and development of an omni-
directional platform, using mechatronics system and
mecanum wheel to implement intelligent behaviours
and maneuvers, with the help of a microcontroller
interfaced with sensors.
REFERENCES
1. Fiegel, O., A. Badve and G. Bright, et al., 2002.
Improved mecanum wheel design for omni-
directional robots. Proc. Australasian Conf.
Robotics and Automation, 27-29 Nov., pp: 117-
121.
2. Regan, T., 1999. A DMOS 3A,55V H-Bridge:
LMD18200. National Semiconductor Application
Note 868.
3. Phillips, J.G., 2000. Mechatronic design and
construction of an intelligent mobile robot for
educational purposes. Master of Technology
Thesis, Massey University, Palmerston North, New
Zealand, pp: 150.